I was delighted to attend the 50th anniversary of St Mark’s in Stockton-on-Tees recently. I was vicar of St Mark’s from 2003.

In 2007, we realised that expenditure was far exceeding income, church membership was declining, and the building, an ugly 1960s prefab, was needing serious money spending on it. The PCC explored the options and decided to close the building and join with the neighbouring parish, Holy Trinity.

Once the decision was finally made, we closed ten weeks later. As our legal status was a church worshipping in a parish hall, we were not subject to the usual rules which would have prolonged the process considerably. It was hard work, but we did a really good job. The Revd Sue Giles, Vicar of Holy Trinity, did a brilliant job in leading Holy Trinity in offering a generous welcome to the people of St Mark’s. Most of the congregation moved to Holy Trinity and integrated well. A few people went to other churches in the area, and that was fine. Some took a while to find their feet in other churches. In the end, only one couple stopped going to church altogether.

It was a real pleasure to see everyone again, more than five years on. I was bowled over by the joy and vibrancy of spirit. I was told that when something needs doing in the church, it is the people from St Mark’s who volunteer. The church is growing and thriving. There was no residual resentment, no regrets.

Sometimes, church buildings have to close. When this is done well, new life can flourish. Nothing is wasted, the old becomes the compost, the tilth, that enables new shoots to grow. St Mark’s didn’t die, it entered into a new life with Holy Trinity, and is thriving.

For me, it wasn’t just a celebration of 50 years of St Mark’s, but also a proud recognition of 5 years of integration with Holy Trinity, of embracing change, and giving room for the Holy Spirit to make good things happen.

The new vicar, the Revd Paul Neville, is newly into post. The church is looking forward to working with him. There was a sense of excitement and readiness for something new. Great things will happen. The church is ready.

Every afternoon at 3pm there was a service at the Temple in Jerusalem. The priest would sacrifice a lamb on the high altar in the courtyard for the sins of the whole nation. The blood of the lamb would be sprinkled on the altar as an atonement for sin, to wash away all the wrong doing and make people right with God. The trumpets would sound and the cymbals would clash. The people would say a psalm. And then the priest would go alone into the sanctuary to offer incense. This gave people a really good moment for private prayer. When we say our own prayers, we are usually quiet about it, we speak to God with our minds and hearts. In Jesus’ day, most people prayed out loud. So you must imagine all those men muttering their prayers. There would have been a great rumble of prayer. The women weren’t there because they would have been in an outer courtyard, away from the men.

Jesus told a story about the people who went to pray. It was a story about prayer, but it was also a story about human nature, and how people get right with God.

Jesus imagined a couple of people who went to pray in the Temple courtyard. One of them was a Pharisee. Pharisees were members of a religious group which tried hard to abide by the Jewish law and do the right thing. And the man in Jesus’ story thought he had done rather well in that regard.

He begins his private prayer by thanking God. That’s a really good start. Giving thanks to God is really important – it is a recognition that everything comes from God. The trouble is, this Pharisee thanks God that he is better than everyone else, and he notes the sinners he can see around him: thieves, adulterers. He is so smug! So self-satisfied! If Mrs Bucket in “Keeping up Appearances” had been a religious woman, this is how she might have prayed. The Pharisee then goes on to list all his spiritual achievements: fasting, tithing. And again, they are really good disciplines in the spiritual life. The bible commends these practices regularly. The Pharisee is proud to point out (to anyone who will listen as he prays out loud), that he far exceeds the religious requirement for fasting and tithing. The Pharisee thinks that doing this makes him superior, more righteous, more worthy. He feels he has earned his place in heaven. God is going to open the gates personally and welcome him in. He thinks his own actions will keep him right with God.

But it’s not as simple as that!

The second man was a tax-collector. He didn’t even try to be good. Just by doing his job, he was a sinner. He was a collaborator with the Roman invaders. Bad! He enforced the tax burden laid on the people by the Roman masters. Very bad! And then he made it so much worse by making a bit for himself on the side. Very very bad! He was probably not a nice man. Everyone hated him. When he walked up to the temple, people would have avoided him, crossed the road, pretended to be looking at anything else rather than catch his eye. He knew that, of course, and when he went into the Temple, he just stayed by the door, a long way from the action.

His prayer was quite different. It was a prayer that arose from his great distress. And we see that because he is beating his chest. Men in the middle-east very rarely beat their chests – that’s what women do when they are distraught. It is a sign that the tax-collector is anguished. His words are simple and short, but full of emotion: “O Lord, make an atonement for me.”

In the meantime, the priest emerges from the sanctuary where he has been offering incense. He declares in a loud voice that the sins of Israel have been washed away and that the people have been made righteous. There is a great sound of trumpets, the choir sings.

And the tax-collector is praying God for forgiveness. He has been moved to tears by the liturgy. He is caught up into the prayers and the ritual. He recognises his own sin and misery and he asks God to make things right.

Jesus tells the people who are listening to him tell the story that it is this man, the tax-collector, whose prayer has been answered, whose relationship with God has been restored.

What kind of prayer does God listen to? Prayers that are genuine, coming from a place of humility rather than spiritual arrogance. Prayers that arise from knowing oneself and acknowledging the mess we humans make. Age, maturity and experience don’t necessarily make us better people. Being good Christians doesn’t stop us from doing hurtful things and saying stupid things. In fact, as you grow in faith, you grow in insight, and notice more and more the things you do and say that hurt and hinder others or the flaws in your own nature that get in the way of God. So there is always something to repent of.

And whose sins does God forgive and restore the broken relationship? Those who recognise and acknowledge their faults and failings, those who long for him, and who want to come home to him.

The priest at the Temple sacrificed a lamb. Another evangelist, John, describes Jesus as the lamb that takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). When Jesus died on the cross, he took away all our sin once and for all.

It was a story, just a story that Jesus told, but it was pointing to what Jesus was going to do, to become the lamb that takes away the sin of the world. Jesus was going to die for tax-collectors and other sinners, for me and for you.

But do you not find that a part of you is thinking, “God, I thank you that I am not like that Pharisee, arrogant and rude and full of myself …”

When you love someone, you want to be with them, you spend time with them, you hang out with them. And then your relationship with them thrives and deepens. God loves us. He is with us always, but really likes it when we spend time with Him. People do that in different ways. Some people make time at the beginning or at the end of the day. Remember how you used to kneel beside your bed before you went off to sleep? Sometimes, it’s about sitting in your favourite arm chair and just being there with God. You can make it special by lighting a candle or looking at an icon or a holy picture, or having something of God’s creation to look at – some flowers or a bonny stone. Just making the time and the place is the start.

You don’t have to be sitting still. You can turn a bus ride or walking the dog into being-with-God time. Music, painting, woodwork can be just as much prayer. When we are concentrating on the task and letting God be there. The other day, someone told me how baking could be prayer for them, which is brilliant. Make space for God in any activity and it can be prayer.

Pray always and don’t lose heart.

Then prayer is what happens when you make the time to be with God. Prayer is the language of love that flows when we spend time with God.

You don’t have to say anything, but most people do. Silence is an excellent prayer.

Words are good too. Just welcome God in to your life. Tell God you love Him. Tell him your troubles. Tell him about the people you have seen today. Tell him about your dreams and hopes.

Pray always and don’t lose heart.

One of the glories of the Anglican tradition is the daily office: Morning and Evening Prayer, a pattern of saying the psalms and other songs from the Bible, and reading passages from the Bible. My mum and dad used to kneel down together and say Morning Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer every day of their married lives. There’s also Compline, which is prayers for last thing at night.

Saying the office becomes part of the daily rhythm of life and prayer. For me it is the bedrock of my praying. I find it makes connections for me between life in the parish and God’s word in Scripture.

There are many different ways of doing Morning and Evening Prayer. I have put some of them on a table in the hall so that you can have a look.

And these days, if you have access to a computer, you can do Morning or Evening Prayer on-line.

Pray always and don’t lose heart.

And if you don’t want to be tied to books or to a computer screen, you could say the Jesus Prayer. It’s a prayer I use a lot, and is one of the most prayed prayers in Christendom. The full version goes: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” But there are shorter versions as well, right down to “Jesus have mercy.”

I have put some leaflets out about the Jesus Prayer in the hall, if that one appeals to you.

I have a prayer rope which I bought in a monastery at Divyevo in Russia when I was there on pilgrimage. It was made by the nuns. It’s a bit like a rosary, though it’s used for the Jesus Prayer. You hold a knot while you say the Jesus Prayer and then move on to the next knot and say it again. The rope helps to keep you concentrated and gives a rhythm to the prayer.

The Orthodox believe that the Jesus Prayer contains the whole of theology and the whole of prayer. It can be a prayer of adoration, a prayer of confession, a prayer of intercession.

I often use the Jesus Prayer when I am walking round the parish, going to meetings, or just walking and praying. I pray for the people who live in this street or for that child who is kicking a ball or for that woman with the pushchair.

Pray always and don’t lose heart.

There are so many ways to pray. I haven’t mentioned using the Bible in prayer, or imagination, or repeating a word over and over.

What matters is doing it, however you do it. Find the way that suits you, and get on with it. Different methods will suit different people, and that’s fine.

Pray always and don’t lose hear.

Things happen when you pray. You bring your life and your concerns before God and ask God to make a difference. You bring with you into prayer the people you care for and all the troubles of the world. You ask God to work through you and through the church. When we pray, we make space for God to work through us. Our own relationship with God thrives and deepens.

On Monday and Tuesday, I was at Minsteracres. The Diocese has put together a programme for clergy in mid-ministry to revive them in prayer and spirituality. We were told this story, based on a book by Joyce Rupp, who writes on prayer:

Grandfather Joe loved his grand-daughter Anna. He went to see her every day and brought her presents. One day, he brought a cup full of earth.

“What’s this,” said the child. “What do I want with a cup full of earth.”

“You’ll see,” said Joe. “I want you to put two drops of water into this cup every day, come what may.”

So Anna took the cup and began to add two drops of water. After a few days, she got fed up of that game.

“I don’t want to do this any more,” she said.

“Just carry on,” said Joe. So she did.

Sometimes she did it as soon as she got up in the mornings. Some days Anna would get into bed and remember she hadn’t put two drops of water into the cup and she would have to get out and do it before she could settle down properly to sleep.

Nothing happened. “What’s the point of all this?” Anna asked.

“Wait and see,” said Joe.

Anna carried on. Two drops of water every day.

Then one day, when she picked up the pot, there was a little shoot coming through. Each day as Anna added the two drops of water, the little plant grew bigger and bigger. And then one day, it flowered. What joy!

“And all it took,” said Anna, “was two drops of water”.

“What made the difference,” said grand-father Joe, “was doing it every day.”

In the Chapel of All Saints, behind the high altar, the four Caroline Townshend window in the north and south walls were given to St Chads in 1909 as a thanksgiving to God when the first vicar, Henry Chadwick Windley, recovered from illness. We don’t know what the illness was. It was a magnificent gift, a wonderful way of celebrating recovery.

Many of you will have experience of healing from illness. I was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and had surgery and radiotherapy. I was very aware of the prayer of friends and family – it was a powerful experience. And I was very thankful for my recovery.

But its not straightforward. Not everybody is cured.

The Archbishop of York was treated for prostate cancer earlier this year. Then a couple of months ago he reported that he had been cured and was very thankful to God.

Someone I knew on one of my e-networks was a bit upset at the tone of the Archbishop’s statement, because a friend of his had cancer and wasn’t going to recover but was declining rapidly towards death.

Similarly, shortly after I returned to work after illness, a young parishioner died of another type of cancer, and his death shook us to the core. He had been prayed for, just as much as me. He had faith and came to church..

Unfortunately, not everybody gets cured, however much prayer is offered, however much faith there is.

The Gospel reading was about healing from leprosy. The ten men who were cured by Jesus suffered from leprosy.

Leprosy is still rife in India, Africa and South America. Over the centuries is has been a disease that has caused so much fear, not to mention disability, pain and distress for sufferers. It can be cured now, by a cocktail of antibiotics, and we praise God that cure is possible. In the past, sufferers were excluded from society because people were afraid of catching the disease.

We may not have leprosy in Britain today, but there are other conditions that generate fear.

HIV and AIDS certainly come into this category, particularly in 1980s when the condition was first recognised and people didn’t understand it very well, so that you got examples of terrible lack of compassion and care, like undertakers refusing to handle the bodies of those who had died of AIDS.

Mental Illness is another area of health that people don’t understand.

The trouble is that where there is a lack of understanding, there is fear and then people behave badly towards sufferers, excluding them, calling names, mistreating them.

On Friday, I went to a conference about churches and mental health. The first speaker was Kevan Jones, MP for North West Durham, who spoke in parliament last year about his experience of depression. He was inspiring. There was a woman on my table who had been a Clinical Psychologist, and was then diagnosed with a very severe form of Bi-Polar Disease. She is so poorly that she attempts suicide at least once a month. Her faith is very important to her. She doesn’t have a church to go to at the moment, because she has been excluded from the churches she wants to go to because she is also gay.

In the discussion I attended in the afternoon, one woman made a distinction between healing and cure. Not everybody is cured from disease. But healing is something different. Healing is deeper. Healing can be learning to live peaceably with a chronic condition. Healing is being open to the wisdom of our frailty. Healing is receiving God’s forgiveness. Healing is dealing with the pain that others have caused us and finding a way to forgiving them. Healing is finding God’s peace and manifesting it in our lives.

As a church, we need to be part of the healing. This church needs to be a place where people can find healing. We will do that when we can offer a real, deep welcome to people – not just a superficial greeting, but accepting people as they are, loving them as they are, whatever diagnosis they carry, however strangely they behave when they are in the grip of illness. How can we make St Chads a safe place where people can find peace and hope, love and faith?

Jesus healed ten men of leprosy. Maybe not all of them had Mycobacterium Leprae; maybe some of them were suffering from eczma or other skin conditions. In Jesus’ day, all skin conditions were classified as leprosy because they didn’t have the means to distinguish one disease from another. Whatever disease they actually had, they had been excluded from their families and villages, unable to work, unable to live a normal life. Jesus sent them off to the priests to be declared clean of disease and fit to return home and go back into society.

The men set off and, as they went, the signs of disease disappeared: the hard, scaly skin turned fresh and new.

One man saw the changes in his body and he was filled with joy. He turned back from the road to the priests – the people who would certify him fit and well – and went back to Jesus, falling at his feet and gave thanks. He recognised where the cure had come from. He knew that God had done this and God was working through Jesus.

This man was healed. He was cured, right enough, but he was also healed.

Kevan Jones said on Friday that his depression was part of who he was. He would never be cured of it, but he had learned to live with it. He accepted it. In fact, he said, he didn’t want to be cured from it, because it made him who he is. That is true healing.

And I can only thank you

Gateshead Foodbank did a presentation at Deanery Synod on Thursday night and showed bits of the DVD they are about to launch about their work. It showed one of the guys who has been receiving help from Foodbank, a young man sponsored by the Probation Service. He was doing a course in South Shields, learning how to work a fork lift truck, and was more or less guaranteed a job at the end, but while he was still doing the course, he didn’t have a lot of money. After his benefits had covered his housing and transport costs, there was nothing left to buy food. So the Foodbank had helped to support him through the difficult times. The local Probation service believe that the Foodbank has helped keep people on the straight and narrow, because they haven’t had to thieve for food. That, my friends, is a result!

Food is a really basic need. You can’t live without it! We are very dependent on those who produce our food, from farmers to factories to supermarkets, take-aways and restaurants. And the politics of food is very complex.

There is the issue of fair trade: Do we buy the cheapest food we can, or do we pay a little extra to make sure the producer gets a fair price? Some people don’t have a choice – if you are struggling to pay your bills, you get the cheapest food you can. And food prices have risen significantly over the last year.

There is the issue of proper care for animals which are part of the food chain: Britain has complied with EU regulations about getting rid of the battery method of keeping chickens for eggs. But not all EU countries have. So there are still eggs in the food chain that have come from chickens kept in cruel conditions.

There is the issue of food miles: food is brought to our supermarkets from all over the world. This has opened up to us a much wider choice of foods that could never grow in Britain, but it has also meant cheaper foreign stuff supplanting the provision of locally grown produce, with the added costs of transportation and using up precious fuel resources.

And that relates to the issue of seasonality. Do you remember seasons, when you could buy different fruit and veg at different times of the year when they came into season? And now you can buy strawberries at Christmas, brought in from far away places, with hardly any flavour.

And over the last couple of years, we have become more aware that people in our country, which is wealthy compared to most of the world, do not have enough money to buy food. We have noticed that the recent changes in the benefit system have put more pressure on people at the bottom of the heap.

Gateshead Foodbank has been open and running for almost a year. It gave out food for the first time on 15 November last year. I volunteer with them once a month, helping to give out food. Other people in the area help with supermarket collections, or organising the food in the warehouse. Churches, including ourselves, have collected food, and I know myself of individuals who have given generously and sacrificially to give food to others. Other people help financially – we as a church have given some of our charity money to Foodbank and others give a little bit each month by Standing Order or Direct Debit – and this money helps to cover the overheads. It has been inspiring to see the way the churches in Gateshead have come together to support this important project.

Celebrating Harvest reminds us where our food comes from ultimately, that God is the source of everything we have, the generous giver of everything we need. As we saw in the Old Testament reading, the Jewish faith built in a harvest thanksgiving right from the early days, to give thanks for all that God had given. And that’s what we are doing today, bringing to mind all that we have received and saying thank you to God. The Jewish people were encouraged to remember the hard times in the past, and how God had helped and supported them through that, and now they were settled and could grow food for themselves. Harvest reminds us of the good times and the tough times. And it reminds us of who God is for us, Creator and Carer.

And because everything we have, every meal we eat, every snack we enjoy, has come from God, then it matters that the process of growing and distributing the food is done in God’s way, in a fair and just way. It matters that we share what we have. It matters that we help those who have nothing.

The Harvest Gospel reading reminds us who Jesus is for us, the Bread of Life, who satisfies all our hungers: physical, spiritual, emotional. We come together each week to eat at His Table; we eat the bread which is his body and drink the wine that is his blood. He feeds us and nurtures us, so that we can be His body in the world, so that we can take his love and care out to our neighbours and to the strangers in our streets, so that we can get involved in Foodbank, or take the vegetables to the Cyrenians.

And there is another harvest, the harvest of our souls. We too are the fruit of the earth, and God is hoping for a good harvest from St Chads, happy, healthy, wholesome people who shine with his love, who can reach out to others, who are confident because they know that God loves them utterly.

When the angel with the sickle comes for you, what kind of fruit can he expect?